What's New at Log College Press? - January 10, 2023

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With the arrival of a New Year, we at Log College Press are continuing to expand the number of resources available to our readers. Last month, in December 2022, we added 524 new works to the site. We have close to 18,000 free works available at LCP.

This week we are highlighting some of the new free PDFs available as found on our Recent Additions and Early Access pages, two features provided to members of the Dead Presbyterians Society.

Some highlights at the Early Access page:

  • James Benjamin Green, A Harmony of the Westminster Presbyterian Standards (1951); and The Distinctive Teachings of Presbyterianism (1936, 1959);

  • John Murray (1742-1793), Jerubbaal, or Tyranny's Grove Destroyed, and the Altar of Liberty Finished: A Discourse on America's Duty and Danger, Delivered at the Presbyterian Church in Newbury-Port, December 11, 1783. On Occasion of the Public Thanksgiving for Peace (1784); and Grace and Glory: or, Heaven Given Only to Saints: a Sermon Preached at the Presbyterian Church in Newbury-Port, Jan 26, 1788, Occasioned by the Death of Mr. Ralph Cross on the 4th of that Month, Aetat 82 (1788);

  • Jonathan Parsons, Wisdom Justified of her Children: A Sermon Preached at the Publick Lecture in Boston, on Thursday, September 16, 1742 (1742); and Account of the Revival of Religion in the West Parish of Lyme in Connecticut (1744);

  • articles from The Presbyterian Standard concerning the debate between psalmody and hymnody by John Thomas Chalmers [Why the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church Adheres to the Exclusive Use of the Inspired Psalter in the Worship of God (1900)]; and Alexander Jeffrey McKelway [Dr. Chalmers’ Failure (1900)];

  • and more by Francis James Grimké, some of which were contributed by a helpful reader: Colored Men as Professors in Colored Institutions (1885); Mr. Moody and the Color Question in the South (1886); The Defects of Our Ministry, and the Remedy (1886); The Secret of Power in the Pulpit (1887); The Pulpit in Relation to Race Elevation (1887); The Negro Will Never Acquiesce as Long as He Lives (1898); The Roosevelt-Washington Episode; or, Race Prejudice (1901); and The Second Marriage of Frederick Douglass (1934).

Some highlights at the Recent Addtiions page:

Also, be sure also to check out the quotes we have been adding at our blog for DPS members: Though Dead They Still Speak, including William M. Blackburn on a Sixth Point of Calvinism; A.A. Hodge on the Change of the Sabbath Day; John B. Adger on the Limits of Church Authority; Philip Lindsley on the Key to Improvement of Time; J.R. Miller on Consecration of Will; Thomas De Witt Talmage on the Christian Way of Measuring Life; Francis J. Grimké on How to Approach the New Year; William H. McGuffey, who argues that the Christian Religion is America's Religion; and T.V. Moore on The Oldest Seminary is the Family Fireside.

We appreciate hearing from our readers if they find matters needing correction, or if they have questions about authors or works on the site, or if they have suggestions for additions to the site. Your feedback helps the experience of other readers as well.

Meanwhile, please feel free to browse the many resources available to our readers in print and in digital format. The New Year is a great time to explore the many Presbyterian voices from the past. Thank you, as always, for your interest and support, dear friends, and we wish you all the very best in 2023!

Log College Press: Summer Update (August 31, 2021)

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So much has been going on at Log College Press that it is often hard to find time to write about it, but we wish to keep our readers aware, so here is a brief summary of recent activity.

In the month of August, we have added 17 new authors and almost 300 new works. That includes 45 works by Charles Henry Parkhurst, 19 by B.B. Warfield, and 16 by J.G. Machen.

We now have around 700 links to useful Secondary Sources which are well worth browsing.

This summer we published Mediations on the Lord’s Supper by Jacob Jones Janeway. And Log College Press was represented at a booth at the PCA General Assembly. We have received much kind feedback from our readers, and we thank everyone for their interest and support. One of our July posts was shared on Facebook at least 144 times and reached over 17,000 people. It is hoped that the work done at Log College Press in dusting off 18th and 19th century Presbyterian works is an encouragement and a blessing to our 21st century readers. We continue to grow and build on this project begun four years ago. Lord willing, there is much more to come.

Blessings to all!

Charles H. Parkhurst: An Advocate for Social Justice

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Although the term “Social Justice Warrior” was not in vogue (or in disrepute) at the time, the Rev. Charles H. Parkhurst might well have identified with the label. Parkhurst served as pastor of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church in New York City from 1880 to 1918, during which time he not only preached the gospel from the pulpit but also, beginning in 1892, famously took on municipal corruption in the form of Tammany Hall.

Vice and crime, as well as unjust law enforcement, had long been a concern of Christians in New York. The Rev. Howard Crosby preached a November 1883 Thanksgiving Sermon at the Fourth Avenue Presbyterian Church titled The City’s Disease and Remedy. After Crosby’s death in 1891, it was Parkhurst who succeeded him as President of the Society for the Prevention of Crime.

In surveying the situation around him, Parkhurst began to realize that so much of the corruption he and his parishioners encountered was not only protected but supported and encouraged by the very officials charged with upholding and enforcing the law. This led to a remarkable sermon preached on February 14, 1892 based on the text “Ye are the salt of the earth” (Matt. 5:13) which he was later to refer to as “The First Gun of the Campaign” against Tammany Hall. His direct assault on city leaders ignited a firestorm of criticism and media attention. In fact, city leaders convened a grand jury to force him to either substantiate his accusations of corruption from the pulpit or else face possible charges himself for perjury.

Madison Square Park c. 1908

Madison Square Park c. 1908

Within one week he was indeed subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury and was not able to offer any substantive evidence to support his claims apart from “uncontradicted newspaper reports,” and thus a week later the grand jury issued a report completely rebuking him and apparently vindicating city leaders. Parkhurst looked upon this development not as a defeat, however, but as an encouragement to go out and investigate the matter himself (he did hire private detectives to assist) and to gather the direct evidence needed to show the link between criminal operations and police involvement. Meanwhile, he continued to preach denunciations of “municipal misrule” from the pulpit. On March 13, 1892, Parkhurst again proclaimed that it was his Christian duty to oppose the corruption that he saw around him.

I do not speak as a Republican or a Democrat, as a Protestant or a Catholic, as an advocate of prohibition, or as an advocate of license. I am moved, so help me Almighty God, by the respect which I have for the Ten Commandments, and by my anxiety as a preacher of Jesus Christ, to have the law of God regnant in individual and social life; so that I antagonize our existing municipal administration, because I believe, with all the individual exceptions frankly conceded four weeks ago, that administration to be essentially corrupt, interiorly rotten, and in all its combined tendency and effect to stand in diametric resistance to all that Christ and a loyally Christian pulpit represent in the world.

After Parkhurst presented evidence to a grand jury in March 1892, that grand jury issued a report which condemned the role of the New York Police Department in fostering and protecting vice and crime in the city. Newspapers took note of how the tables were turned. Public pressure continued to mount upon the Police Department and the Tammany Hall leaders, culminating in the Lexow Committee’s investigation of police corruption, including bribery and organized crime, which did much to expose the connections unearthed by Parkhurst and the City Vigilance League, of which he also served as President.

The boss of Tammany Hall, Richard Croker, was forced to leave the country and reside in Europe for three years following the work of the Lexow Committee. A new mayor was elected in New York City in 1894 who did much to reign in the abuses of Tammany Hall. Municipal reform achieved a great victory in these various ways, and much of that victory is attributable to the perseverance and unflinching determination of Rev. Charles H. Parkhurst in the face of great opposition from those who ran city hall.

He addressed an audience on May 14, 1894 at Union Theological Seminary on the topic of the place of the pulpit in the area of social reform.

I am to speak of the relation of the minister to good government. In order to avoid all misapprehension, let us start out by saying that nothing should be allowed to interfere with the pulpit's prime obligation to convert men, women, and children to Christ in their individual character. No one can have attended carefully to Christ's method of working in the world without appreciating the emphasis which he laid upon the individual, and without feeling the volume of meaning there is in the fact that so many of his finest words and deepest lessons were delivered in the presence of but a single auditor. There are no associate results which do not hide all their roots in the separate individualities that combine to compose such association.

At the same time, what God thinks most of is not a man in his individual character, but men in their mutual and organized relations. That is the idea that the Bible leaves off upon, and in that way throws upon the idea the superb emphasis of finality, culminating, as Scripture does, not in the roll-call of a mob of sanctified individualities, but in the apocalyptic forecast of a holy city come down from God out of heaven; not men, therefore, taken as so many separate integers, but men conceived of as wrought up into the structure of a corporate whole social, municipal, civic.

Men require to be sanctified, but the relations which subsist between them require to be sanctified also. Philemon was a Christian and Onesimus was a Christian; but Onesimus was still Philemon's slave. Philemon had been converted, and Onesimus had been converted, but the relation between them had not been converted. A good part of every man is involved in his relations, and heaven is not arithmetic but organic.

Wherever men rub against one another, therefore, the pulpit has something to say, or ought to have something to say.

Read the story of his reform efforts in his own words in Our Fight With Tammany (1895) and My Forty Years in New York (1923).

Life's Golden Lamp: A Devotional

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A devotional prepared by Robert M. Offord (a minister in the Reformed Church in America and the editor of the New York Observer) in 1888 and published in 1889 is a remarkable resource. This writer was combing the bibliography of B.B. Warfield some time ago when it first came to his notice. A daily devotional by Warfield based on Hebrews 2:13 for January 13 — How Shall We Escape, If We Neglect So Great Salvation? — is included. The volume is titled Life’s Golden Lamp For Daily Devotional Use: A Treasury of Texts From the Very Words of Christ. 365 ministers contributed devotional meditations for every day of the year, and many of them were American Presbyterians who are found on Log College Press. Some ministers outside America were included, such as Charles Spurgeon and Adolph Saphir, both of London. Some were at the time serving as American missionaries in foreign lands. All of the contributors were generally Reformed and Calvinistic. Life’s Golden Lamp represents an anthology of Scriptural passages and devotional literature from around the world by men who were actively serving the kingdom on earth in 1888-1889.

In recent days, we have circled back to this particular devotional, and thus, many other extracts from this volume have been added to the site. The number of LCP author contributors is remarkable. Work is ongoing to identify all the Presbyterian ministers whose devotionals are included, but here is a partial list so far:

Each daily devotional includes a poetic composition, and the signature of the author of the devotional meditation. The whole volume is worth consulting, but we draw your attention to the fact that this 1889 yearly devotional contains at least 50 contributions by Log College Press authors, many of whom are luminaries of church history. It is a work that is filled with the sweet savor of Biblical piety, and we highly commend it to your consideration.